Indian Colonization, Research Paper Example

The colonial experience, on the one hand, can be generalized, in so far as all colonial experiences entail the hegemony of a foreign power on a local population. However, such a view overlooks the very specific and unique colonial experiences, which particular colonized people underwent. Thus, whereas colonialism may be defined as “a practice of domination, which involves the subjugation of one people to another” (Kohn, 2012), each colonized people will experience colonialism in a unique way, since the colonial relationship is one between a particular colonizer and a particular colonized people. In the case of India, therefore, the colonized experience of the people is inseparable from the colonial practice of Great Britain. Namely, India was not colonized by a particular country in name, but rather by the East India Company, such that, as Peers (2013) writes, one of the key questions of the Indian experience is the following: “how did a commercial company become a territorial empire?” (20) The Indian colonial experience, in other words, is deeply related to the concept of how capitalism, an economic system, can become a force of domination.

From this perspective, we can understand the Indian experience as a type of hegemony and domination, as present in all colonial relationships, but one in which the ideology that this was above all an economic domination differentiated it from the pure conquest of military power and subjugation. This is how the East India Company itself expressed its own presence in India: “the East India Company…pronounced that it was opposed to conquests, for conquests were viewed as being inimical to trade.” (Peers, 20, 2013)The ideology of conquest through economics as opposed to conquest through force presents an image of the colonizer as ultimately benevolent. The colonizer does not come with the sword, but rather the promise of prosperity. Arguably, this played a key role in Indian colonial history, helping explain how the colonial practice was successful despite the fact that the British began their colonization when “the Mughal Empire was one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful, empires in the world at the beginning of the eighteenth century.” This was a subversive form of colonization that required time to realize it was in fact colonization.

The reality of British colonial rule comes to the Indian consciousness perhaps only in 1858, when the East India Company dissolved. The true face of colonialism, more easily recognizable, now emerged. Of course, in Indian colonial history numerous wars were waged, such as the Anglo-Sikh wars. But these wars were between the particular Sikh community and the British hegemony. Economic interests disguise, in other words, the aggressive nature of colonialism and it took the end of the East India Company and the continued British presence in India to realize this. This is why, perhaps, the Indian independence movement also proposed a strategy of non-violence and economic boycott, such as the salt protests of Gandhi: the “passive” ideology of the colonizer could be most effectively countered by the “passive” resistance of the colonized.

This perhaps also explains the development of post-colonial India. The widespread use of English, for example, demonstrates that the relationship to Great Britain is ambiguous in Indian history: a more explicit hegemony in the form of military force would have perhaps changed this dynamic. Perhaps this also explains the economic path of India, for example, embracing capitalism through its growing IT industry. India represents a particularly interesting case for colonial and post-colonial studies, in so far as it demonstrates that particular structures of the colonial relationship can in fact produce different effects, despite the reality that colonialism is always a relationship of domination and hegemony of one people over another.

 Works Cited

Kohn, Margaret. “Colonialism.”.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2012. Retrieved 22 September, 2015 at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/colonialism/.StS

Peers, Douglas M. India Under Colonial Rule: 1700-1885. London: Routledge.